Fully Myelinated

Wednesday July 09, 2008

McCain is a disgrace on Social Security John McCain's most recent comments on Social Security are absolutely breathtaking in their stupidity. He's admitted he doesn't really know much about economic policy, but this is ridiculous.

Asked by a young woman if she is likely to receive Social Security benefits someday, McCain said it was unlikely "unless we fix it."

"Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today," he said. "And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's got to be fixed."

Matt Yglesias:

Of course in their day, present-day retirees were working and their tax dollars were paying folks who were retired back then. And in exchange for that service when they were workers, today's retirees get to enjoy a secure retirement. Yes, on my dime. And in exchange I expect that when I retire, ensuing generations will be there for me. I call it generations looking after each other, so that those who built the present with labors in the past get to enjoy some of the fruits of their labor. The federal government calls it Social Security. John McCain calls it a disgrace.

Kevin Drum:

This is nuts. McCain is talking as if he just figured out that this is how Social Security works and he's scandalized by it. Needless to say, though, this is the way virtually every retirement system in the world works, and it works fine. What's more, if Social Security really does turn out to have a shortfall in future years, it's easily fixed by a very modest combination of higher taxes and reduced benefits — exactly the bipartisan, reach-across-the-aisle solution forged in 1983 that McCain is constantly praising (and that he voted for as a freshman congressman).

In short, this comment shows McCain to be either a) disgracefully stupid, or b) disgracefully dishonest. I don't think there is a c), so take your pick.

Posted by shgreene ( Jul 09 2008, 08:12:19 PM EDT ) Permalink

Jesse would approve As we've been hearing so much lately about how Jesse Helms would always stand for what he believes in no matter the personal cost, perhaps he would appreciate this story:

RALEIGH - L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he'd ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms.

Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley.

When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms. After several hours' delay, one of Eason's employees hung the flags at half-staff.

The brouhaha began late Sunday night, when Eason e-mailed eight of his employees in the state standards lab, which calibrates measuring equipment used on things as widely varied as gasoline and hamburgers.

"Regardless of any executive proclamation, I do not want the flags at the North Carolina Standards Laboratory flown at half staff to honor Jesse Helms any time this week," Eason wrote just after midnight, according to e-mail messages released in response to a public records request.

He told his staff that he did not think it was appropriate to honor Helms because of his "doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice" and his opposition to civil rights bills and the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Posted by shgreene ( Jul 09 2008, 12:16:52 PM EDT ) Permalink

Tuesday July 08, 2008

33% of Americans think God is schizophrenic I just finished reading an absolutely terrific book, How to Read the Bible by James Kugel. Kugel summarizes modern biblical scholarship on the entire Old Testament. Kugel explains the books of the bible within the original contexts in which they were created, and most importantly, explicitly lays out the very different assumptions upon which the Bible has been understood through most of its history (e.g., God does not contradict himself, The Bible is full of hidden meanings that belie the stated meaning, etc.). We learn that modern scholars have found that the language of the Covenant between God and Israel is remarkably similar to pre-existing covenants between early Middle-Eastern rulers and their vassal states. Likewise, we find how the odd story of Jacob and Esau can be explained by relations between the tribes thought to have descended from these brothers. What was most interesting to me was the aspects of the Old Testament already staring me in the face that I-- like most people-- had simply been oblivious to. The God of Genesis, the God who gives the Ten Commandments is quite clearly conceived of as fixed in a particular time and place. He moves around. He is neither omniscient of omnipresent. Yet, later conceptions within the Bible and our current Jewish and Christian conceptions certainly hold God to be omni-present and all-knowing.

Among the other aspects of the bible that believers are used to overlooking is the fact that the Old Testament is simply rife with contradictions that really cannot be logically explained (not that many have not tried). The Bible says the passover meal should be roasted, only to say that it should be boiled a few sentences later. All sorts of biblical stories are told in multiple versions (including the creation of the world, and the Ten Commandments), that are simply not reconcilable. If, like me (and most mainline Protestants and Catholics), you take the Bible to be important for its larger messages and are not too upset by the quite obvious role of the humans involved in creating it, that's not really a problem. However, to believe that the Bible is the "literal word of God" is basically to believe that God is essentially schizophrenic and suffers from a multiple-personality disorder. Nonetheless, the Pew foundations recently released their latest "Religious Landscape" survey which finds that a third of all Americans, 59% of Evangelicals, and about 23% of mainline Protestants and Catholics agree that "the Bible is the literal word of God" (emphasis mine). I was disappointed, though not surprised, that nearly a quarter of all Catholics hold this intellectually untenable view that has never been supported by the Catholic church itself. On some level I had known that a literal interpretation of the bible was ahistorical and dumb, but now that I have learned so much about the Old Testament, I know that it is really dumb.

Posted by shgreene ( Jul 08 2008, 11:12:23 AM EDT ) Permalink

Monday July 07, 2008

Homosexuality and Olympic sprinters I must admit to being taken aback for a split second last week when I saw a sports page headline along the lines of "Gay wins 100m." "What's his sexuality got to do with it, I thought, before realizing it was the winner's last name. With that in mind, I found this quite hillarious:

In addition to blocking traffic from websites they don?t like, it looks like the web-geniuses behind the American Family Association?s OneNewsNow site have a few other tricks up their sleeves, such as automatically replacing any use of the word ?gay? with the word ?homosexual? in any of the AP stories they run ? leading to instances in which proper names are reformatted to meet their ridiculous standard, such as this article about sprinter Tyson Gay winning the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials in which he is renamed ?Tyson Homosexual?:

Posted by shgreene ( Jul 07 2008, 07:59:15 PM EDT ) Permalink

Jesse I've read so much interesting commentary on Jesse Helms in the few days since his death. Hard to pick my favorites to go with, but I'll try a couple. First, let's just be clear, however nice he may have been to people he liked, the man was an unrepentant bigot. Period. By all accounts he was a pioneer in using race-baiting as a successful political strategy, and to whatever degree he "mellowed" he remained an unrepentant bigot till the end. It is a stain on my home state of North Carolina that it repeatedly elected him to the Senate. TNR's Jonathan Chait seems to have the most succinct summation on Helms' legacy and the awfully disturbing praise for him from Republican quarters:

The New York Times obituary of Jesse Helms had the temerity to note that he "opposed civil rights." National Review's John Miller objects:

He "opposed civil rights"? Uh, no. He opposed a particular vision of them.

Hilzoy has a lot of detail about Helms' "particular vision" of civil rights. Among other things, Helms was an avowed believer in black intellectual inferiority, an hysterical opponent of interracial marriage, called the 1964 Civil Rights Act "the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress," and said of civil rights demonstrators, "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights." Helms' "vision" of civil rights for African-Americans was that there should be none.

The mainstream conservative position on civil rights is that the equal rights of the early civil rights movement were good, but things started to go wrong with the imposition of affirmative action. It's a flawed though not illegitimate view. But Helms wasn't a champion of color-blindness who objected to quotas. He was an out-and-out white supremacist.

Moreover, it would be one thing if conservatives celebrated the things they liked about Helms' life while disavowing his bigotry. But their unalloyed celebration of Helms is a staggering indictment of movement conservatism's views on race.

As mentioned by Chait, Hilzoy does a phenomenal job cataloging many of Helms' most odious statements and beliefs. A couple of my favorites:

"Crime rates and irresponsibility among Negroes are a fact of life which must be faced."

“To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.”

And, what I think is most disturbing (as Chait mentions) in the response to Helms' death is the unqualified praise Helms is receiving from Republican quarters. Hilzoy catalogs that as well in the same post. For example, Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, "Today we lost a Senator whose stature in Congress had few equals. Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in." Of course, one of those causes was keeping the Black man down. It would be nice to see a little more honest reporting in just what these "conservative principles" Helms stood for really were.

Posted by shgreene ( Jul 07 2008, 02:34:21 PM EDT ) Permalink

Back in the saddle "Update your blog" demand my readers (okay, just one of them). Thanks for the push, LS, normal blogging duties to resume imminently. Posted by shgreene ( Jul 07 2008, 02:24:48 PM EDT ) Permalink

Tuesday June 24, 2008

Oil drilling With gas prices what they are, there's been a lot of news lately about possible drilling in ANWR and expanding off-shore oil drilling. Of course, what is usually not mentioned is just how incredibly marginal the impact of this will actually be on energy prices. The government's own Energy Information Administration estimates that when ANWR would be fully on-line-- a couple decades from now-- we could expect a drop in the price of oil by a whopping $.75 per barrel (courtesy, Kevin Drum). Would that even save us $.01 a gallon? The simple truth is, oil is a global commodity in a global marketplace and nothing the US ever does is going to be more than a drop in the bucket. All else being equal, presumably more oil is better, but let's not kid ourselves about the actual benefits.

Posted by shgreene ( Jun 24 2008, 05:24:19 PM EDT ) Permalink

The more you look the more corruption you find in the Bush administration. In what should be not the least bit surprising to anybody even half paying attention to politics:

Justice Department officials improperly used political and ideological factors to screen applicants for the agency's prestigious honors and summer intern programs, sometimes rejecting otherwise qualified candidates because of their ties to Democrats, internal auditors said in a report issued this morning.

Not at all surprisingly, two Bush political appointees are responsible...

Two members of the screening committee in 2006, Esther Slater McDonald, an adviser to the associate attorney general, and Michael J. Elston, chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, considered political and ideological factors when rejecting candidates "and thereby committed misconduct," the investigators said.

McDonald allegedly wrote "disparaging" remarks about job seekers' liberal ties on their applications, and Elston allegedly failed to take action when the problems were brought to his attention by another concerned member of the hiring panel, according to the report.

On the bright side for President Bush, when people look back years from now on his administration, the fiasco that is the Iraq War will surely largely overshadow the 19th century level of corruption he has brought to the executive branch. This from the man who campaigned on restoring "honor and integrity" to the White House.

Posted by shgreene ( Jun 24 2008, 03:11:12 PM EDT ) Permalink

More on China's cement production Last week I reproduced a really cool graph created by my friend, political scientist extraordinaire, Kyle Saunders. Turns out, I wasn't the only one who thought this was really cool and a lot of blogs that people actually read linked to this as well. Consequently, Kyle has now achieved the ultimate goal of all political scientists-- he was on NPR's "All Things Considered" this weekend discussing the impact of China's cement production on global warming. What's pretty funny about this is that Kyle didn't actually know anything at all about the topic till Monday of last week, but thanks to a cool chart, he's NPR's go-to guy. Nonetheless, he gives a pretty interesting interview on the topic (and actually really sounds like he knows what he's talking about) if you are curious.

Posted by shgreene ( Jun 24 2008, 01:07:24 PM EDT ) Permalink

Monday June 23, 2008

McCain's economic disinterest As I've mentioned before, I think the fact that this is a really bad Republican year will defeat John McCain as much as anything. The fact that he's utterly clueless on the economy and cares even less sure is not going to help him either. Kevin Drum reports McCain's and Obama's comments from a recent Forbes interview:

What do you see as the gravest long-term threat to the U.S. economy?

Obama: If we don't get a handle on our energy policy, it is possible that the kinds of trends we've seen over the last year will just continue. Demand is clearly outstripping supply. It's not a problem we can drill our way out of. It can be a drag on our economy for a very long time unless we take steps to innovate and invest in the research and development that's required to find alternative fuels. I think it's very important for the federal government to have a role in that process.

McCain: Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we're in against Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence. Another successful attack on the United States of America could have devastating consequences.

As Kevin puts it:

Two things are remarkable here. First, that McCain genuinely seems to believe that Islamic extremism poses not just a threat, but a threat to the very existence of the West. This is science fiction territory. Second, that he apparently can't come up with any better answer to Fortune's question about economic threats. Not energy, not high taxes, not runaway entitlement growth, not healthcare, not globalization, not any of a dozen plausible answers that would have gone down fine with his base. Instead, "His eyes are narrowed. Nine seconds of silence, ten seconds, 11." And then he came up with Islamic extremism.

I think this clearly shows McCain's general disinterest in the economy-- far and away the number one issue for voters right now. The press is giving him a complete free ride on this stuff right now, but at some point he's going to say something this useless when it matters.

Posted by shgreene ( Jun 23 2008, 05:45:34 PM EDT ) Permalink

Friday June 20, 2008

Pregnancy pact Bill Boettcher has demanded that I blog this bizarre news story. From time.com:

As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there's been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, "some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. "We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy," the principal says, shaking his head.

Noted without further useless comment from me.

Posted by shgreene ( Jun 20 2008, 11:37:43 AM EDT ) Permalink

Children oppose Universal health care Nobody does satire like the Onion. This video is absolutely brilliant:

Posted by shgreene ( Jun 20 2008, 08:01:14 AM EDT ) Permalink

Thursday June 19, 2008

War criminals? Wow! An amazing indictment of the Bush administration's torture regime from former two-star general Anthony Taguba, the general charged with investigating the abuses at Abu Graib. Dan Froomkin somes it up quite succinctly:

The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability.

In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees." He called the abuse "systemic and illegal." And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement.

Now, in a preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of former detainees, Taguba adds an epilogue to his own investigation.

The new report, he writes, "tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individual's lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.

"The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full-scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted --both on America's institutions and our nation's founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.

"In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. . . .

This final paragraph is quite the damning indictment (bolding mine):

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Andrew Sullivan also has a great post on the matter. My favorite part:

And all this was done not in the chaos of a battlefield or even by rogue units or POW camps. It was not done in a war with anything like as many soldiers and battles as World War II. It was done in a closely managed war by a professional military and intelligence service in every theater of combat as a concerted policy to get more intelligence about Jihadist terror and the Iraq insurgency. It was authorized directly in the chain of command by the president, who knowingly broke the law and hired lawyers to tell him he hadn't. No clever argumentation that "only" 270 prisoners remain at Gitmo can gainsay that. And it is not, by the way, evidence against the fact that this administration seized countless innocents and tortured them to say that they eventually released most of them. It is no consolation to the torture victims at Abu Ghraib that they were eventually set free and their innocence confirmed. Those are the standards of benign dictatorships, not democracies.

And, on the war criminal front, over at TNR, Scott Horton writes that a number of Bush administration officials better be careful where they travel, lest they actually be held accountable for their actions. It would be nice to see some of these anti-democratic thugs masquerading as civil servants get what they deserve.

Posted by shgreene ( Jun 19 2008, 04:02:27 PM EDT ) Permalink

Is your marriage suffering? Now that gay marriages are happening in California, the huge damage to heterosexual couples must already be under way. Imagine all the pain and fighting going on in California's heterosexual couples as "the institution of marriage is undermined." Oded Gross sums it all up perfectly in this video (thanks to Matt Yglesias):

Posted by shgreene ( Jun 19 2008, 11:13:58 AM EDT ) Permalink

Wednesday June 18, 2008

Doubly-depressing McClatchy continued its terrific series on Guantanamo today with a story about how the prison has taken ordinary Middle-Eastern thugs and turned them into radical Islamists bent on harming the United States. Well done Bush administration! The details:

A McClatchy investigation found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantanamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam ? thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them ? and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists.

The radicals were quick to exploit the flaws in the U.S. detention system.

Soldiers, guards or interrogators at the U.S. bases at Bagram or Kandahar in Afghanistan had abused many of the detainees, and they arrived at Guantanamo enraged at America.

The Taliban and al Qaida leaders in the cells around them were ready to preach their firebrand interpretation of Islam and the need to wage jihad, Islamic holy war, against the West. Guantanamo became a school for jihad, complete with a council of elders who issued fatwas, binding religious instructions, to the other detainees.

Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, until recently the commanding officer at Guantanamo, acknowledged that senior militant leaders gained influence and control in his prison.

File under, "not at all surprising" the fact that:

Pakistani police intelligence concluded that the men ? the majority of whom had been subjected to "severe mental and physical torture," according to the report ? had "extreme feelings of resentment and hatred against USA."...

"A lot of our friends are working against the Americans now, because if you torture someone without any reason, what do you expect?" Issa Khan, a Pakistani former detainee, said in an interview in Islamabad. "Many people who were in Guantanamo are now working with the Taliban."

Anyway, once again, some truly outstanding reporting from not the New York Times or Washington Post, but sadly the latest news is that McClatchy is cutting 1400 jobs (10% of its workforce). For the record, McClatchy recently combined with Knight-Ridder, about the only national news organization that got things right about the Iraq war. Sadly, we can probably expect less of this great reporting in the future. And the reason for this-- the internet. With everybody placing their ads in Craig's List, Cars.com, etc., newspaper revenues are way down. So, I guess that means: saving money using on-line sources = decline in journalism. Bummer.

Posted by shgreene ( Jun 18 2008, 06:09:06 PM EDT ) Permalink